When I started reporting at The Kansas City Star in late 1970, it was a regional newspaper that served not just the metro area but also east to mid-Missouri, west to central Kansas, and beyond. I was part of a staff of hundreds, and the paper’s circulation — all print then, of course — was in the hundreds of thousands daily with the morning Kansas City Times and the evening Star. About a year ago, by contrast, audited figures showed print circulation of The Star (The Times disappeared in 1990 and the name of the evening paper was transferred to the morning paper) was just above 23,000 while the electronic edition was a bit above 31,000. I now live in an apartment complex containing about 170 units. My wife and I are the only Star print subscribers in our building. And my guess is that the newspaper’s print edition will disappear in a year or two. This experience of shrinking (or dying) newspapers is not unique to Kansas City. What may be a bit unusual here, however, is that while we still have an active (through shrunken), award-winning daily newspaper, we also have a series of other journalistic enterprises to fill in where The Star no longer provides much coverage. The Kansas City Star, founded in 1880, occupied this building at 1729 Grand Boulevard, from 1911 until 2005. It’s now called Grand Place and is being turned into a mixed-use development at the edge of Downtown. (Bill Tammeus | Flatland) Flatland, in fact, is a good example of that. The result of this decentralization of journalistic output here has something important to do with truth and the public’s understanding of that concept. And journalism has a commitment to truth in common with religion, the field I’ve written the most about for the last several decades. Every world religion, after all, has core teachings about truth — what it is, why it matters. In Christianity, for instance, truth is not fully contained in a doctrine or dogma. Instead, truth is a person, Jesus Christ, who, in the Gospel of John, called himself “the way, the truth and the life.” In Judaism, from which Christianity emerged, you’ll find a similar notion in Jeremiah 10:10, where the prophet declares: “The Lord is the God of truth.” And in Islam, one of Allah’s many names is Al-Haqq, which means the one who embodies truth. In The Dark Yet despite having print and online news sources that encourage us to know and honor truth, we live in an age of purposeful mis- and disinformation, as the last election showed again. And without independent journalists, we have no reliable way to detect when public officials (or businesses) are lying to us. The sad diminution of American newspapers has left many citizens with fewer resources to discover truth. The good news is that Americans seem to understand that good media coverage is a must. A recent survey by Pew Research showed that a near-record number of Americans trust the media to act as a check on politicians’ worst impulses. Timothy Snyder, in his new book “On Freedom,” describes what happens when reliable media vanish: “Local newspapers disappear or are bought by hedge funds and continue as digitalized shells without local coverage or local color.” And he adds: “Most of American territory is a news desert, and a news desert is no land of the free.” Snyder adds, “It is not just the facts that go missing when reporting ceases, but also our sense of the diversity of the country, down to the level of its counties, its farms, its porches, its grandmothers.” The Unknown The stories that didn’t get reported could have helped readers know the shenanigans political leaders are up to and to know what social and governmental systems are failing and why. They could have given a boost to wonderful volunteer efforts to nourish children with safe after-school activities. They could have sparked an idea for a new way to combat climate change. Still, as I mentioned, the Kansas City area has journalistic efforts beyond Flatland — some in print, some online, some both — that help to cover what the diminished Star no longer does. These include: Kansas City Beacon, Missouri Independent, Kansas Reflector, KC Studio, Johnson County Post, (Independence) Examiner, Kansas City Jewish Chronicle, Kansas City Call, The Next Page KC, KC Hispanic News, The Pitch, Kansas City Defender, Dos Mundos, Northeast News, Martin City and South KC Telegraph and more, including blogs and podcasts plus local news coverage by radio and television. One popular online site (maybe because readers can say almost anything in response to what’s posted there) is Tony’s Kansas City, which aggregates local news items and commentary and offers them with opinionated introductions. But if you’re not subscribing to or listening to or watching any of these sources (some are free), you’re not getting what you need to be an informed voter and active citizen. In effect, an explosion and scattering similar to what happened decades ago in television — which used to offer just three national networks — has happened to print and now to online journalism. We can bemoan this development or we can change our reading habits to make sure we’re getting enough reliable information to tell the difference between truth and fake news. As Snyder writes, what traditional newspaper reporters “brought was not just facts but values: for example, wonder, admiration, respect for science, attention to local color.” If we don’t support quality journalism, we will have thrown away one of the best defenses against untruth, including the still-extant Big Lie that Donald Trump really won the 2020 presidential election. Without good journalism, we’ll fall for hoaxes and lethal lies. When I graduated from Mizzou’s still-marvelous journalism school and took my first newspaper job on the now-defunct afternoon Gannett newspaper in Rochester, New York, I typed my stories on an upright manual typewriter. Those stories were set in metal type by a huge linotype machine. I don’t want to return to those cumbersome days, but I do want people to take more seriously their responsibility to be well-informed so they can be patriotic citizens. And true patriotism means the duty to criticize the government when it’s bungling things. But without reliable journalists telling us when that’s happening, we’re lost. Bill Tammeus, an award-winning columnist formerly with The Kansas City Star, writes the “Faith Matters” blog for The Star’s website, book reviews for The National Catholic Reporter and The Presbyterian Outlook. His latest book is Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety. Email him at [email protected]. The post Truth, Religion and the Demise of Local Newspapers first appeared on Flatland.